On Valentine’s Day of last year, I wrote a post about the long tradition of political ridicule, in which I featured an unflattering political cartoon of Thomas Jefferson:
It’s not very nice. Disrespectful, even. But presidents have been subjected to innumerable comparisons with animals. George Bush was so routinely likened to a chimpanzee that it ceased to shock anyone.
Yet with this president, any and all ridicule is seen as racist, simply because he is black. Bush as chimpanzee was standard operating fare, but in the case of Obama, when a bookstore inadvertently had a book about chimpanzees for sale near books about Obama, there was an uproar.
Ever the vicious troublemaker, I PhotoShopped the chimp book out and substituted an evil book about gay sex!
To my utter astonishment, there was no uproar. Not even in my comments — although one did opine that the chimp I removed had been a Bonobo.
(Sorry to digress, but I am feeling under pressure lately to put gay stuff into posts lest certain commenters feel neglected. I know it’s irrational, but I try to satisfy.)
Anyway, the latest uproar is over a cartoon said to make fun of Michelle Obama’s double standards in dieting as well as her alleged weight issues.
It showed her with a plate of hamburgers:
The authors describe the hysteria that resulted:
…last Sunday we turned in what we thought was a very mild cartoon mocking the first lady’s over reach of her powers. And I decided to show her eating hamburgers like Wimpy from the old Popeye cartoons to mock the fact that she tends to scold other people’s eating habits, yet every time we read about what they’re eating at the White House, it’s extreme. And to throw in a gag we used before, the President is shown eating hardly anything.
The cartoon did not get a lot of comments at first. I figured it was rather mild. I would try to be funnier next time. Little did I expect the firestorm that followed a few days later.
The propaganda wing of the Democrat party known as Media Matters for America, who is out to destroy all critics of this administration, ran an article saying the cartoon attacked the first lady’s weight and gave out our emails, encouraging people to send us hate mail. Like pigs to the trough the mainstream press jumped on the story. Yesterday morning I got up and saw it mentioned on several websites like Salon. The NY Daily News wanted to interview us. And it was on the local TV news. We started getting inundated with hate mail. But the worst was yet to come.
The Daily News article came out and basically said we were mocking her weight, which wasn’t true at all. We posted our full response on the Big Sites and my blog. Most of the emails and comments we received during the day were about us allegedly mocking her weight. And I had to set people straight over and over again. Some of them accused us of racism. Which is just the left’s way of telling you to shut up. One e-mailer suggested our cartoon was going to inspire teen suicides because we were supposedly mocking body issues.
But then they died down. As evening came, I got a message that MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell was taking us to task, calling us mentally disturbed racists. He showed our pictures. He gave out where we lived. Told people to go after us. Even mentioned Batton’s wife who had nothing to do with the cartoon.
Predictably, diet-related ridicule led to death threats.
Who the hell do they think Michelle Obama is, anyway? Muhammad?
I can remember Hillary Clinton being routinely mocked for her “piano legs” and more.
Anyone remember the Hillary Clinton fried chicken special?
2 fat thighs, 2 small breasts, and a bunch of left wings!
They even came up with a picture of a KFC with a sign, which I managed to find:
I don’t feel like PhotoShopping, but suppose I changed “HILLARY” TO “MICHELLE.”
Would that be racist? Why?
How about this picture of Barack Obama?
Have things have reached the point where we can’t even joke about or make cartoons of our leaders in the way we have always?
Forgive the rhetorical question. There is nothing new about this malevolent nonsense.
It evokes vintage Ann Althouse:
Lots of people who voted for Obama believed that his election would reflect the extent to which Americans had moved beyond racism. That was part of why some people voted for him. Little did we realize that it would turn every criticism of the President into an occasion to make an accusation of racism. Racism is revolting, but so is the notion that we aren’t allowed to criticize a President!
Jimmy Carter’s supremely sleazy accusation requires a solid, sound rebuke. It is an effort to place the President of the United States beyond criticism. . . . And since demanding apologies is all the rage, let me say that I would like the wizened old husk of a former President to beg our forgiveness.
And even earlier (pre-election) vintage Glenn Reynolds:
I can think of no better reason to vote against Obama than the prospect of an administration where any criticism of the President is treated as racism.
While there are a lot more reasons now, that still remains a leading reason.
It’s a sorry state of affairs that the White House has become a racist food fight.
Still, at least it’s ridiculous.
There’s a certain small comfort in that.
MORE: While it’s tedious to have to point it out again, recent events demonstrate that in politics today, the real racism is on the left — and it includes advocacy of lynching and vicious racial slurs.
Moral lesson?
Political criticism coming from the right is racism. But genuine racism coming from the left is political criticism.
It probably would make sense to a post modernist multiculturalist.
UPDATE: Many thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link, and a warm welcome to all.
Comments appreciated, agree or disagree.
MORE: Commenter Dave M. (now in S. Korea) reminded me of the double standard involving Sarah Palin:
Instead of “racist,” if Hilary had been elected every criticism would be met with the shrill cry of “sexist.” Of course, the actual sexist remarks made about Sarah Palin don’t count.
This is a basic law of Identity Politics:
It is a basic law of identity politics that such identities are conditioned upon being on the left. Which is another reason that no indignity heaped on Sarah Palin can ever be condemned as sexist.
Comments
17 responses to “Chickens just won’t stop coming home to roost!”
“piano legs” ?
I thought the preferred term is “cankles”.
“It probably would make sense to a post modernist multiculturalist.”
You are probably correct on that (I was going to say right but…). However, I’m not one and it doesn’t make a bit of sense to me. (sigh.)
Does anybody even listen to the Left and their “racism” crap anymore? It seems like they only know two words, “racism” and “Hitler”. Without those words, there’d be no difference between them and rabid dogs.
Yes, many people voted for Obama to prove they weren’t racists.
For whom are they going to vote in 2012 to prove they aren’t fools?
2 fat thighs, 2 small breasts, and a bunch of left wings
A lost masterpiece by Salvador Dali?
http://www.3d-dali.com/Tour/giovane.htm
So it’s unacceptable and beyond the pale to make fun of Michelle’s fat a$$, but perfectly fine to mock Gov. Chris Christie as a fat slob?
At least Christie isn’t the one scolding us to eat healthier.
I envy Democrats; never let it be said that they let conscience or shame impede any sense of a moral code. Is it that they don’t care they’re hypocrites or that it’s perfectly justified in their eyes?
Here on the North Shore of New Jersey, the term of art for our incumbent poseur-in-chief is “Smudge.” Not only his dull-eyed visage of pulled pork but everything this crapulent twerp touches suggests that title. “Smudge”… yeh, that fits. The grimacing ‘groid behind him knows the drill.
Abraham Lincoln as a monkey, holding the Emancipation Proclamation. http://www.abrahamlincolnsclassroom.org/Cartoon_Corner/index3.asp?ID=456&TypeID=5
Remember all the editorial cartoons featuring Condi Rice and Collin Powell as Mammy and Sambo? Or the weekly news magazine’s photoshopped cover of Clarence Thomas as a lawn jockey? Or all the times convervative black candidates have been called oreos, for being black on the outside and white inside?
The left doesn’t have any right to call anyone racist until they stop that kind of crap. And the sad fact is, they never will. Because they’re mostly a bunch of closeted racists who pretend otherwise, in order to obtain the support of blacks.
But let a conservative black try campaigning and they all prove just what a bunch of racist, intolerant bigots they are.
‘lanched:
http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/115296/
I can think of no better reason to vote against Obama than the prospect of an administration where any criticism of the President is treated as racism.
The first mate, who barely reads my blog, let alone Instapundit or any other blogs made the same observation before the election.
That’s a nice pair of quotes, Glenn’s June 2008
I can think of no better reason to vote against Obama than the prospect of an administration where any criticism of the President is treated as racism
and 15 months later, Althouse
Little did we realize that it would turn every criticism of the President into an occasion to make an accusation of racism
Though to conform to modern style, that second line should be written more like, “Leftist demagogue with a lifelong history of guilt tripping stupid white people ducks criticism by hurling baseless accusations of racism, unexpectedly.”
Instead of “racist,” if Hilary had been elected every criticism would be met with the shrill cry of “sexist.” Of course, the actual sexist remarks made about Sarah Palin don’t count.
Hillary has “piano legs?”
I thought it was those hideous cankles everyone referenced.
The entire issue of race with respect to Obama is a charade and a mirage. When he says he is “black”, and the left treats him as being “black”, this is sheer manipulation for political advantage. Obama’s race, like everything in lefitst-land is an ideological truth, not a literal one.
When Nobel Prize winning poet Tony Morrrison can write an October 1988 New Yorker article titled “Clinton as the first black president”, then what is “black”? When the NAACP calls the black conservative Kenneth Gladney, “not black enough”, and “not a brother” then what is “black”? When Time magazine’s Jack White calls Supreme Court Justice Thomas, “the scariest of all the hobgoblins”, saying “Washington seems to be filled with white men who make black people uneasy”, than what is “black”? And when Obama, a man whose mother is Caucasian, can tell us in a widely read autobiography that in his youth he struggled with his racial identity before *deciding* to be black, what is “black”?
When Bill Maher, during a panel discussion on HBO complains that Obama’s policies are “half-assed” “because he’s only half black.” and that “if he was fully black, I’m telling you, he would be a better president.”, and that “there’s a white man in him holding him back”, than what is “black”?
CNN’s Soledad O’Brien writes of a private meeting in 2007 with Jesse Jackson in her book, “The Next Big Story.” During the meeting, Jackson complained to O’Brien, whose mother is a black woman from Cuba, that there weren’t any black anchors on CNN. She wrote, “He looks me in the eye and reaches his fingers over to tap a spot of skin on my right hand. He shakes his head. “You don’t count,” he says.” She closed the section with “[t]he arbiter of blackness had weighed in. I had been measured and found wanting.”
“Black” in all these contexts, as well as Juan Williams’s complaint on Fox News that the extraordinarily lopsided expression of Missouri voter sentiment in August of 2010 rejecting ObamaCare was really about race, is clearly not about “race”. It is about ideology, socialist ideology.
As these expressions of “black” pile up in the mind of the public, more and more will wake up to this truth: socialists will say anything, pull any heart string, evoke any tear and will descend to any dirty trick to advance their favored cause. If we think they have reached bottom with Juan William’s complaint or Bill Maher’s comparison, you haven’t seen anything yet. And that is exactly why these people must be disempowered, defunded and shown to be the frauds they are.
As far as I am concerned, we are all made in the image of God. While we all have the same rights and deserve the same respect, none of us have greater rights or deserve greater respect than anyone else.
With respect to BHO being black: it is not about the race he was born with, it is about the ideology he adopted. It is not what percent black he is, it is about how thoroughly red he is.
This whole bunch of lefty BMW (bitch, moan and whine) just reminded me of who the First couple resembles…
Jack Spratt,
could eat no fat…
And so on…
Sheesh…
Thanks for mentioning us. The story is indeed surreal, but then again, it raised our profile, so I suppose it can’t be all bad. A Huffington Post article on the cartoon had over 2,200 comments and most of of them defended us as not racist. Many even said they were sick of seeing the R word bandied about so carelessly.
I demonstrated in O’Donnell’s real race feelings in the article when I mention that he described Michael Steele as “dancing as fast as he can to please his masters at the GOP”